How Small Brands Will Survive the "Dead Internet" Age
So, you've heard about "dead internet" theory. (The bots rule everything and the spice must flow.)
But the discourse is missing out on one of the most important parts of social media: the social part has always been made by and for people. Right now, bots, agents, and AI-search functionalities that minimize clicks are changing the game. And while some large e-commerce platforms are benefitting from this new environment, smaller businesses, organizations and non-profits have been left with fewer resources and more complicated choices when it comes to building visibility.
Let's do the numbers on that.
Trusted Experts as Essential Digital Workers.
Now the good news. Across social media, coding, comms, SEO and marketing, specialists are rebuilding the foundations that budget cuts and restructurings hollowed out. Specialists like me are bringing our skillsets and learnings from larger organizations to ensure that smaller brands can thrive.
Much like a plumber, a bus driver, or your local grocery store manager, think of social specialists as the internet's essential workers. We know the inner-workings of platforms, what's trending and what's not, how to steer clear of being "cute (derogatory)" (more on this in a future blog post), and how to build real trust-based communities.
Human-driven storytelling.
Right now, a rapid outpouring of low-quality AI-content is fueling platform instability and it's not getting brands the attention they had hoped for. This means that human-driven images, writing, technical knowledge, expression and humor have become high-value content for many consumer segments. In an environment where engagement is starting to nosedive in many spaces, social specialists know how and where engagement is shifting.
Let's look at posts from large corporate brands that are getting top-notch engagement right now: audience reacts for House of the Dragon on HBO. Reaction meme UGC made by real people screenshotted and posted to their account made us feel something- like we're part of a community of people who enjoy a show and a little bit of online shade too. They leverage relational marketing first principles that directly reach core consumers and make them the main characters for a moment. That connection is powerful, but it's also a testimonial for their product and it's reminded so many viewers of what it was like when brands moved with more intentionality. More directly, it's reminded people of the online communities of the past decade that made social media fun to be in at a time when digital life feels... off.
The smartest small businesses and brands are making human-centered marketing and making it the heart of how they move, not an afterthought. They're not building exclusively for bots because, as recent Cloudflare data shows, the presence of bots is higher than ever but human users still comprise ~42.5% of site traffic. Many social media specialists are keeping their focus on human-led design and writing, while also optimizing by query intent for search discovery. That means that you're not only building brand awareness in your hyper-local networks (shoutout to the small-town social media workers) but also building broader visibility in search.
This moment is about thinking beyond trends and chasing virality to how your audience actually asks questions, thinks about community, builds relationships, and tells stories.
Auditing for AEO/SEO Discoverability.
Auditing your brand's social media presence for visibility, combining the fundamentals of SEO, AEO, and GSC feedback is now the baseline in our new search environment powered heavily by AI. Audits are a means to protect your brand from AI errors (sometimes called hallucinations) which can cause brand damage or simply low-quality content with little authority. But on the positive side, analyzing how brands and organizations are visible within these engines can provide insights into the search queries people are using to find your business and the questions they want you to answer. Monitoring across Google Search Console as well as social analytics is now the new gold standard.
Best Practices Are Essential. Period.
But it's also about a return to best practices. So many of the clients I've worked with over the past two years have been finding growth from a return to shoring up the technical side of social media. That is, conducting an audit and building their digital foundations with a measure-twice-cut-once approach that is deeply grounded in having a human who does account and community management.
These small brands are securing handles on all platforms to protect their brand name. They're using Alt-Text, subtitles on all Face to Camera videos, and CamelCase for hashtags to make their content as accessible as possible to wider digital audiences. Specialists are managing the technicalities for them when platforms make quarterly or monthly shifts on formatting, hashtag weights, and content ranking. AI search engines purport to understand these changes, but their answers often have inaccurate or incomplete information. Better quality content that is research-informed and that directs back to landing pages and newsletters is yielding sign-ups, conversions, and building better discoverability.
The smartest and most agile small teams are moving toward a trusted steward model of the internet; one that understands how important it is to prep your garden soil, cultivate and grow in ways that yield robust but sustainable traffic, not boom-bust growth. They're re-wilding the internet with human-centered storytelling while leveraging strategies that take the current search environment into account. They're saying "yes-and" to narratives that introduce relatable human moments, humor, joy, and wonder back into the terrain of emotion-based ranking.
In the age of artifice, build something real.
As feeds have become more customizable to users, people are experiencing vastly different internets through their personalized niches. And the silo-effect is real.
So, the next time someone asks you "is the internet dying?", build your brand so you can answer with "which internet do you mean?"
Start here:
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